Those who knew too little
by mikefrombelgium
Summary: My name is Theodore Nott, 19 years old, I am a Pure Blood wizard of an old family, I was a Death Eater, and I will die today.


Disclaimer: I don't own this universe, of course, I'm just toying with it.

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Note : this story is AU, and completely ignore the canon end.

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**_Those who knew too little_**

My name is Theodore Nott, 19 years old, I am a Pure Blood wizard of an old family, I was a Death Eater, and I will die today.

It is nearly the end of the night and I will be killed at dawn, so the time I have to write my story is rather short.

I will not die in combat, I will be executed by our enemies.

I have been sentenced to death for the crimes I committed during the war.

The wizarding culture is dying, is already dead in fact, there is just a few walking corpses remaining here and there, too stubborn to admit their own passing.

Nearly all the Pure Blood have already been killed, and the other are just "not dead yet".

We simply lost the war, badly, in fact it was a crushing defeat.

We lost the war because of the Pure Blood bigotry, ignorance, stupidity, prejudice, imbecility, pigheadedness, our refusal to learn or change …

And for those flaws, we deserve to die, because we ruined the wizarding world.

At the beginning of the war, everything went so well, the Ministry for Magic was a bunch of idiotic cowards, too busy with their corruption to do anything, the forces of "The Light", with very few exceptions, were just morons who refused to kill their enemies, and wanted to give second, third, fourth or more chances at redemption to "misguided" Death Eaters, and to try to save and redeem us, who were "lost in the darkness", they were willing to sacrifices their lives and those of innocent bystanders, and finally, the ordinary people were just too scared to do anything beside hiding in their homes and pray that they won't be killed.

The Death Eaters were tough, determined, ready and willing to torture and kill to win this war.

We had the resources, the weapons, the will, the soldiers and the leaders we needed to conquer the wizarding world.

And we did, in a few months the forces of the Dark Lord took over the Ministry, Hogwarts, all the wizarding communities, first in Britain, then in Ireland, and then we moved to the continent, defeated the aurors and destroyed the Order of the Fried Chicken, which was more a fan club of that senile old fool Dumbledore than a fighting force.

Nobody stood against us. We had won, we were the masters of the world.

And then, less than a year after the start of the war, we discovered we all made a horrible, irreparable and fatal mistake.

All of us Pure Blood supremacist did, including the Dark Lord himself.

We did this mistake out of ignorance, but mainly because we did not even bother to learn.

The Half-Bloods and the muggleborns tried to warn us, but we did not listen.

What could they possibly knew that we, the Pure Blood, the aristocratic elite of the wizards, did not?

Our mistake was to forget a little thing in our conquest plans, oh not much really.

We just forgot to take in consideration nearly 7 billions muggles, and how little the Pure Bloods knew bout them.

There was simply too much thing we did not know about the muggles, most of what we did not know, we could have learned if we had bothered to read muggle books or newspapers, watch TV a little, or simply listen to the Half-Bloods and the muggleborns.

For example, the crushing numerical superiority of the muggles, 7 billion muggles against less than a million wizards worldwide, less than 200 000 of them Pure Bloods.

And when the conquered wizarding world, led by the victorious Dark Lord Voldemort, went to war against the muggle world, we also forgot that, by definition, Half-Bloods and muggleborns had muggle relatives, and therefore simply won't fight against their own families.

We also didn't recognize the enormous difference in effectiveness between the wizards and the muggles when it came to War.

Oh, in a one to one fight, normally, any wizard must win against any muggle.

But in WAR, things are very different… for the muggles.

Our ignorance came, again, from our own Pure Blood bigotry.

Before the war, in the British wizarding world, the job a witch or a wizard could have was largely determined by blood status.

As the various boards of examinations were nearly exclusively made of Pure Bloods, nearly all the jobs that requested an approval by a commission went to Pure Bloods, including teaching in magical schools.

In consequence, the few Pure Bloods who decided to take Muggle Studies in school were taught by… a Pure Blood.

And one of the stupidest men I ever met, one who did not bother to even MEET a single muggle in his entire life, who did never read any muggle book, and who based his entire course on wizarding books written by other Pure Bloods.

And unfortunately for us, his books were at least 200 years old.

In the wizarding world, very few things changed in the last four centuries, so we assumed that the few differences in the muggle world would mean nothing.

We were ready to exterminate mobs of ignorant peasants armed with pikes, pitchforks and muskets, led by hysterical priests going into a crusade against those "in league with the Devil".

And we faced something very different, we faced enemies who did not fight like us at all.

For us wizards, a war is like this: the 2 sides go against each other, each combatant select an opponent and duel to death, and then, the survivor go against another opponent, the operation is repeated until complete elimination or surrender of one of the sides.

The side which has the most skilled individuals usually wins.

For the muggles, war is not about individual feats, it is about organisation and teamwork, and incidentally includes such things as Armies, heavy weaponry, artillery bombardment, big war machines, air support, and far, far worse.

The first Pure Blood wizard to encounter a heavy tank was very surprised, for about one and a half second.

The first broom rider who was reduced to meat paste by a supersonic missile did not have the time to figure what killed him.

The first group of Dead Eater that fell to chemical weapons were caught completely unaware.

The second group confronted to those toxic gases tried to use the Bubblehead charm, only to discover that aerosolized neurotoxins can enter the bloodstream by skin contact.

In addition, we simply did not know what the most basic muggle weapons can do.

Now I do know, and given the difference between a common muggle soldier and a basic Death Eater trainee, we could not have won.

A killing curse, while insuring the death of your victim if it hits, is difficult to cast, is not too accurate, moves not really fast and is very visible, and so can easily be dodged.

Casting a curse at an enemy more than a few dozen yards away is pointless.

In addition, it is very difficult to cast some of the most powerful curses with a wand that is not your own, and making a wand is not an easy job.

A muggle gun is easy to make, easy to use, and is completely NOT tuned to its user, any muggle can use any gun.

A muggle gun bullet moves very fast, is very accurate, is impossible to see while moving, can hit a man sized target at hundreds of yards, and enough of them can overpower the best magical shields.

There were literally hundreds of millions of muggle small arms ready to be used for war.

And this doesn't include heavy weaponry.

Against the normal weaponry of the muggles, considering the difference in effectiveness and the muggle huge numerical superiority, we would have lost, badly.

But there was also lot of things that no wizard knew about the muggles, because the muggles hid those things, and hid them damn too well.

We did not know how much the muggles knew about the wizarding world.

If they are far better at hiding their secrets that we are at hiding ours, they are even better at finding other people secrets.

They have literally thousands of professional paranoids devoted solely to the task of finding what the others don't want them to know, and they are very good at their job.

Oh, the muggleborns and the Half-Blood did not warn them, they found us by themselves.

Because of a simple oversight on our side.

The basic charms and spells that prevent the muggles to see the wizarding world works by mind alteration, the eyes see, but the mind records something else.

We simply forgot that this wouldn't work on some muggle technologies.

We were simply spotted by spy satellites.

In addition, the most powerful hiding spells, those that prevent even a wizard to see something, will still be seen by those machines.

Not really seen per se, but when the muggles observation experts have a large black area of nothingness on a picture, and know that the satellite works fine, they usually investigate.

And so they found us, and they discretely learnt about us, and when they discovered the Pure Blood supremacists ideas about the muggles, they made war plans and began to secretly develop new tools and weapons, just in case.

As they say: "better have one and not need it than need one and not have it".

We therefore did not know the existence of those weapons and technologies, which officially "did not exist".

Including jamming devices preventing apparition, portkeying, and floo travel.

Muggle electronic technology shielding able of protect from some offensive spells and curses, transfiguration and vanishing spells, preventing the wizards to easily take out the muggle equipment.

So, when the muggle soldiers equipped with the most advanced weaponry, the weapons that "did not exist", appeared on the battlefields, the war was quickly over.

Those "super soldiers" have an armor that amplify their strength, speed and stamina, and protect them against most spells.

Stunners, bludgeoning curses, cutting curses, flame curses, freezing curses, bone breaking curses, blood-boiling curses, entrails-expelling curses, vanishing spells, banishing spells or transfiguration have no effect whatsoever on them in their armor.

And the killing curse doesn't always kill one of those soldiers at ranges in excess of 50 yards.

They are equipped with guns that launch armor piercing explosive bullets with great accuracy at incredible speed, I think that this gun is called a "magnetic accelerator gun".

At ranges up to 500 yards, they nearly never miss human sized targets, even ones in fast motion.

Less than 5 of those bullets are enough to break a magical shield, and if you are hit by one of those, you die, doesn't matter where you are hit.

I was captured during one of the first battle against the super-soldiers.

I was not hit, merely knocked out by a nearby explosion and when I woke up, I was gagged and bound and they snapped my wand right under my eyes.

I watched the remaining of the war from a secure prison.

A muggle prison.

Protected by heavy weaponry, minefields, tanks, helicopters, super-soldiers, jamming devices, shields and other things I never knew about, but the only time the Dark Lord tried to break us out, the attacking Death Eater heavy assault team lost and died to the last man, killed by the defences of the prison, not a single casualty amongst the muggle guards.

The Dark Lord then took hostages and demanded our release in exchange.

The muggles did not negotiate, they took hostages of their own and began to execute them until the Death Eaters freed their hostages.

To add insult to injury, there were televisions in the prison, televisions that never went off, and that gave news from the war 24 hours a day.

I watched the armies of the muggles swiftly and efficiently destroy the Pure Blood wizarding world, killing and capturing Death Eaters and sympathizers.

After a series of bloody defeats, the last remaining forces of the Dark Lord and his allies, mainly a Brazilian necromancer and a Chinese dark wizard, decided to regroup to launch a counter strike.

What remained of their armies gathered in the impregnable fortress of Azkaban, the Dark Lord's place of power.

What they did not know is that the muggles had been waiting for such a gathering for quite some time.

The television showed it live.

The muggles sent a message to the Dark Lord, demanding his unconditional surrender.

He laughed.

And then he realized he had fallen into a trap.

Jamming devices prevented the Dead Eaters to magically leave, but they were not too worried, they had enough supplies to sustain decades of siege, the fortress was impregnable, everyone knew it, and even the muggle super-soldiers could not conquer Azkaban.

The muggles didn't bother to try.

A blinding flash of light, and the whole fortress, and everyone inside, simply vanished.

I couldn't understand what happened and asked a guard.

The guard told me "the last nest of your kind of murdering bastard had just been nuked by a 100 Megatons warhead".

The war ended this second, the rest was just clean up.

A few weeks later, I was tried for my crimes by the muggles.

My muggle lawyer explained to me that I was not tried for being a wizard, or for being a Death Eater, or even a defeated enemy.

I was merely tried for multiple cases of murder and rape, like a common criminal.

I was guilty, and I knew it, my lawyer made a good defence, but it was pointless, my guilt was obvious for everyone, me included, and I had no hope of being freed.

In addition, with the destruction of the Pure Blood culture, I did not see the point of trying to live.

I was sentenced to death by hanging, and my lawyer again explained to me that this sentence is the usual one for common murderers.

The final insult.

Now, like many Pure Blood supremacists, I am in the death row of a high security prison.

But not for very long.

My execution is scheduled for today at dawn.

And I just saw the first sunrays of the day.

My last sunrise.

I am lucky, I had enough time to finish writing the story of my death, the tale of our enormous mistakes due to our collective towering hubris, our unthinking arrogance, the fall of the Dark Lord and the death of the wizarding culture.

I don't know what will happen to the Half-Bloods and the muggleborns, to all the wizards and witches that did not fight against the muggles, and frankly, I don't care.

Now I hear the footsteps of the guards just outside my cell, and the key in the lock.

It is time.


End file.
